Josh Dehaas: When the public needed info on Wainwright, a journalist was prevented from getting it

An ambulance sits outside the emergency room at Wainwright Health Centre in Wainwright, Alta., on Sunday. Photo by Megan Albu/AFP via Getty Images

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On Saturday evening, news started circulating about a serious fire at Canadian Forces Base Wainwright in Alberta. Defence Minister David McGuinty gave a rare Saturday evening statement confirming that there had been injuries and deaths, but he didn’t say much more. Like many Canadians, I went to bed Saturday night thinking about the soldiers’ friends and families who would be worried sick and desperate to know more details.

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On Sunday morning, I turned on CBC News Network to find out what happened. It had nothing new. Neither did CTV News Channel. This bothered, but didn’t surprise, me. Canada’s traditional media is a shell of its former self. I know from experience.

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Several years ago, when I worked there, it might have been me in the CTV national newsroom in Toronto when the news came through on a Saturday night. I would have been overseeing the national website with a single online writer, and there would have been only a handful of producers, writers and reporters on the TV side.

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There likely wouldn’t have been a single national reporter in Alberta on the weekend. There was only one such reporter and she didn’t work seven days a week. There would also only have been a few bodies in the local stations in Edmonton and Calgary. If anything, there are fewer now.

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Without reporters on the ground, government officials remain in control of the narrative. Their tendency is to keep all information secret until they’re certain that it won’t make them look bad — or until a reporter finds out the truth through unofficial sources and the government can no longer deny it.

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While it would be disrespectful to publish the names of the soldiers who died before their families were informed, the public has a right to know basic facts about what happened as soon as government knows them.

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By Sunday morning, we had a right to know the suspected cause of the fire, what burned, how many people were sent to hospital and how many had died. These questions are necessary for holding government accountable and deeply important for the friends and families of the victims.

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Prime Minister Carney provided some answers in a Sunday morning news conference, but even then, we were left mostly in the dark.

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With nearly zero information on CBC or CTV’s news channels on Sunday morning, I turned to X instead. One of the first things I saw was footage filmed by Calgary-based independent journalist Mocha Bezirgan, who dropped what he was doing and drove to Wainwright to report from the scene.

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In the early hours of Sunday morning, Bezirgan reported that he saw four ambulances go by in the direction of Edmonton. He conducted an interview at 5 a.m. with a McDonald’s drive-thru employee, who couldn’t confirm anything but added important colour. He also had footage from outside the base. Bezirgan didn’t have much, but he had more than CTV or CBC. He was actually there, seeking out answers.